Tivoli Storage Productivity Center is an invaluable tool to help you manage and monitor the health of your Information Technology infrastructure. Read the latest draft of the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Beyond the Basics IBM Redbooks publication which details how you can:

-Monitor storage and network device performance

-Configure alerts to receive reports of problems and changes in the environment

-Track storage usage and capacity/availability

The Tivoli Storage Productivity Center web-based GUI is your window into the health of your IT environment. The dashboard provides a quick visual assessment, surfacing status information - Normal, Warning, Error - of the devices you are monitoring with the application. From there, you can drill down to access greater detail to quickly evaluate and correct problems.

But what happens if the doctor is sick and can't see patients?

To realize the maximum value and benefit possible with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, it is important to properly administer the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center server and application.

In addition to normal server administration and maintenance, the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center administrator needs to maintain the repository database where device configuration and data collected from the environment is stored. This is critical for efficient performance of the application, affecting both monitoring and reporting functions. There are other important considerations for Tivoli Storage Productivity Center administration as well, such as backups to provide for recovery in the event of a disaster.

Special thanks to the diligent work of the Redbooks Team of residents that participated In the effort in Tucson to rewrite the Redbooks publication Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Beyond the Basics. In this book, we not only examine the health checking topic in some detail, we also provide a chapter with practical Tivoli Storage Productivity Center database management advice and examples.

This week IBM Systems and Technology Group is hosting an Analysts Insights event in Greenwich Connecticut. IBM FlashSystem + LTFS Enterprise Edition with Elastic Storage are highlighted to show how you can benefit from the speed of IBM FlashSystem and the cost performance of tape. Based on business requirements Elastic Storage provides a seamless policy driven Dynamic Tiering that will put the data in the best location on the best tier (performance and cost) at the right time. Figure 1 shows Hot Data needing the fastest access times will reside on flash and the Cold Data needing automatic access with the lowest cost per GB will migrate to tape.

With Dynamic Storage Tiering you benefit from:

Single scale-out data plane for the entire data center

Single name space no matter where the data resides

Dynamic Tiering for files: Select data tier based on the file's "heat"

Khanh Ngo, Sr. LTFS EE Test Architect, is presenting the live demonstration at the Analysts Insights event (Figure 2). His demonstration consists of Elastic Storage, LTFS EE with the new TS4500 Tape Library , and a FlashSystem 840 using Dynamic Tiering to move files between flash and tape based on the "heat" of the files.

Figure 2, Khanh is ready for his FlashSystem + LTFS EE with TS4500 Elastic Storage demonstration with the analysts

Here are the links for additional information about the products used in Khanh's demonstration :

With the IBM Storage Integration Server, you get a control layer that will fetch the information from XIV, and cache that information. All the repetitive requests, from the VMware components can now be served from that middle tier. All the orchestration and integration is happening through that cached server and it can provide the requested information to the layer above without hammering the XIV (storage port).

Version 1.5 also features an improved server administration GUI.

You can read an overview, see illustrations, as well as learn about the advantages that the new version offers in the IBM RedPaper: